5.6.0 has a number of nasty bugs that (at the very least) 5.6.1 fix, especially in unicode support. Also, Apple built their perl in a way that makes their perl modules go into an essentially unversioned directory, which makes it harder to upgrade perl as time goes on.
The longer they wait, the messier the upgrade is going to be...
Actually, even by your example, his argument stands.
When you get your license you are entering a contract with the state, saying "I am aware that if I exceed the posted speed limit I could get fined or even have my license taken away." When you speed, you're aware of the penalties and do it anyways. When you use multiple computers and your ToS says you can only use one, if you get caught, tough shit.
Paying for the service and then misusing it is only telling them that it *is* in their best interests to leave things as they are, and that they can continue to stick it to you all they want. On the other hand, if they start losing business, perhaps they'll cut their restrictions to draw customers. It works for SpeakEasy -- they have a ton of loyal customers because of their very easy-going ToS.
Yes, monopolies are bad, but breaking the contract you agreed to doesn't make them alright, it just makes you both bad.
I don't have an answer, but I do have a question. I never have understood "Ask Slashdot"s like this. My question is: why don't you join the mailing list?
It's usually readily apparent whether something's active by getting on theer list and seeing what kind, and how much traffic is going by. What does asking here gain you, other than a delay while you wait to find out?
I'll probably get marked as a troll by those linux zealot moderators among us, but oh well.
Not necessarily a troll, but I definitely disagree. And your attitude will likely get you troll status no matter how true or false your argument is. Anyways...
This "study" is preposterous. While Linux has a lower TCO in small lab or workgroup environments it is highly unsuited for real enterprise environments.
I think it would be the other way around. Small environments don't have the manpower for setup, but enterprise environments usually have to custom-build solutions no matter what they start with, be it Windows or Linux.
While Linux has many of the same feature analogs that Windows 2000 does, the Linux ones are usually incomplete or far inferior to their Microsoft counterparts and require a significant amount of time to install (In order to install software X I have to recompile these libraries too?!? But software Y relies on them, oh? I have to recompile that also?), maintain, and upgrade.
If this is your impression of linux, then you must be doing it wrong. You almost never need to hand-compile stuff nowadays. Most distributions not only have most of the stuff you need out of the box readily available, but have sane upgrade systems as well.
- A Distributed Directory Service. OpenLDAP with SSL? PLEASE! Active Directory works well, right out of the box.
And where exactly is your argument as to why LDAP doesn't work?
- Client Policy Management. Uh, I can install Samba and hack away to get ntconfig.pol to work, which is a seriously out of date policy scheme from the NT/9x days, or Active Directory.
I'm really not sure what you're saying here.
- Remote Software Installation? In Linux, whichever hack you choose, it's going to require a lot of administrator time. With Windows 2000, you've got the package installation via GPO's. Easy to setup, and you can automaticaly configure clients with software packages based on the organizational unit (eg. Lab 1 in building 4) they're in.
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade
- Centralized Management Tools. There are a few crappy third party tools for Linux, but they suck, to be frank. With Windows 2000, you have the MMC tool. Heavily upgraded since the NT4 days, this tool allows you to generate custom toolsets to administer your entire organization from one window, if you choose. Just add a snap-in and go.
There's a number of centralized management tools that get the job done, although I agree they're not as pretty as some of the Windows stuff. They're not unusable though.
- Remote Administration. Linux? X11 or VNC. Windows? The excellet Remote Desktop/Terminal Services software. Much more stable, smoother (movies & sound via RDP anyone?), and not clunky.
Maybe you can argue clunky, but unstable? X11 and VNC are perfectly stable.
- Kerberos, with no dicking around, nuff said.
Yeah, kerberos is still a bit of a pain, but much improved in recent distros.
- Enterprise monitoring utilities. With Linux, you have things like BB and syslog, yippee. With Windows 2000, you have BB, but also excellent tools like Microsoft Operations Manager, and the numerous other network monitoring tools (like the cool ones from Solar Winds).
- Automatic Updates & Patching. I think Red Hat still has that crappy update utility, sucks if you've gotta update 50 servers that way, though. Microsoft? Software Update Services and Automatic Updates right now. Not the perfect solution, but much better than what Linux has going for it.
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
With an even moderately competent Win2k administrator a network can be almost completely managed from his desktop.
Wasn't the whole point that a moderately competent Linux administrator managed more servers well than a moderately competent Win2k administrator? It's not like they made it up, they did a survey.
One can even argue that, with a competent administrator for each, Windows 2000 can be made more secure (while still being perfectly usable). I won't even get into the whole debate about the number of Linux exploits compared to the fewer Windows 2000 exploits on Bugtraq, because that really doesn't mean much overall.
Yeah, a good administrator can secure either OS reasonably well.
When it comes to pure software price, sure Linux is cheaper. When it comes to the enterprise? Please! Linux can't compete, right now. Microsoft software appears expensive (and most certainly is overpriced), but when you figure in man hours installing, updating, and maintaining, salaries for those people, and downtime while you recompile app x and lib y and app z that depends on y, Windows 2000 starts to look very attractive.
I think the whole point was that even counting all those things you're mentioning, Linux came out cheaper. You can always make an argument either way, but the point is, they went to real companies and asked them about their costs.
You make the assumption that Apple encourages GNU-Darwin.
Apple pretty much ignores GNU-Darwin; the only Darwin they care about is the one in Apple's CVS (and, by extension, OpenDarwin's CVS), not some guy's fork of it.
The thing that people seem to be missing in this discussion is that GNU-Darwin is *not* Apple's Darwin. They could care less about GNU-Darwin, and, in fact, pick BSD-licensed alternatives to GNU software if possible. Whether it's for idealism reasons or business ones, no one but the people making the decisions can say.
...is it just me, or is it a bit funny that a Sci-Fi author is convincing you to stop paying attention to Fantasy and instead think of Science? Can't help but think there's a bit of self-promotion there. =)
I'll second that... Standalone Complex is incredible. Closer to the manga, and just better done than the movie, I think. The movie was pretty light on character development, even though it was technically beautiful.
That would definitely be a problem, the 10.1 dev tools are not compatible with Jaguar at all. Install the July tools, and then the subsequent patches, and you should be fine.
Try a 'fink selfupdate-cvs' to get your base fink packages up to the latest. The likely problem is that your apt sources.list is pointing at the wrong place (we had to move the binary URL so it could coexist with 10.1 binaries on the apt repository).
A selfupdate-cvs should upgrade your apt and set up the proper locations, and from there you can do an "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" to get your installation updated.
this only works if you don't use 'fink' for installing source packages... fink (the program) doesn't (yet) understand held packages -- only dselect/dpkg/apt.
I think this is an incredible idea. Your post just sparked a discussion with my cube-neighbor about it, we had a couple of ideas.
Say an artist logs in and signs up to list new songs. He uploads some, and they immediately show in the "New Releases" area. The first (50? 100? Function of the number of visitors?) downloads will be free, to give a baseline for popularity. From there, popularity will determine the price. The quicker those 100 $0 MP3s get downloaded, the more valuable they'll be, so word-of-mouth on the discussion boards or whatever will help give them a jumping point.
Once the artist has made it into a pay setup, he can say how long he wants it to be free, what he wants as a minimum cap for the price, etc.
The price will be continually updated, determined by the popularity over a given time period, and then normalized by the artist's preferences on price and stuff. It ends up being kind of a stock market for music. =)
I really think this is an incredible idea. If I had the time I'd be in on trying to make such a thing, but alas, I already have too much crap going on as it is...:P
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong
on
10.2.2 Is Coming
·
· Score: 3, Informative
ext2 and ext3 are identical on-disk, except ext3 has a journal file.
Apple's HFS+ journaling is apparently similar, in that all you need to do is run a command to enable journaling on a disk, without reformatting.
They can't take my DeBrand chocolate away! This stuff is so good I ordered some and shipped it halfway across the country. Looks like it's time to make another order and help them out. No ulterior motive there... =)
Unfortunately, the iMow isn't selling well ; They only sold about 500 units last year and Friendly Robotics's US local company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year. They've already dropped the price 50% since it's introduction[...]
Umm... didn't you pretty much answer your own question? They dropped the price in half and still no one's buying it, and they're on the skids to boot.
Of course, your examples are all games, which are a rather special case in the software industry. Most games only have a life of 6 months or so to make 95% of the money. And games' target audience are the people *least* likely to put Linux on the desktop -- well, second least. Most gamers like to tinker at least a little. The every-day mom or dad user is the least likely, since they have no reason to switch.
Anyways, what's much more likely is porting things that corporate users would use. If a web design company can pay $700 for Windows + DreamWeaver for their employees, or $300 for Linux + DreamWeaver, all else being equal, they'll pick the cheaper.
The author's point is that right now, all other things aren't equal. Most Linux ports of useful commercial software are incredibly half-assed.
I don't know if I agree with him that there are enough people that will buy the Linux versions that it will be worth the effort, but I do know that out of the many examples you could give, games are the least likely to succeed.
Linux is finally on equal (or better) terms in the server world, after many years of work. Only now is it starting to be looked at on the corporate desktop. There are still a number of steps that have to be made in the commercial world before things move seriously to the desktop in the kind of numbers that will have game sales support development on Linux in any reliable numbers.
Not currently, but it's recently been discussed. Please open a feature request before someone forgets about it, it would definitely be a handy thing to have...
Re:The compiler who cried wolf?
on
GCC 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
As someone who works on a "distribution", I can say that it's not that simple. There's a *lot* of work that goes into fixing things that break on the move to new compilers, and into handling binary incompatibilities.
Apple has moved to GCC 3.1 with their new MacOSX release, and it's been a *real* pain handling the switch. The issue is not a matter of things that have been rebuilt to work with each other, the issue is maintaining backwards compatibility with old binaries. If joe sixpack built some package into/usr/local that uses C++, it will be broken when he upgrades... it's the same on every distro, unless you build things twice, or rebuild *everything*.
We use RT and once we got 10 thousand tickets or so it became unmanagable. The database abstraction module that RT uses coupled with the way that they query the database has made it all but unusable once you fill the database with more than a couple thousand tickets, at least on our machine, which is a PIII 800 with a gig of RAM...
I've done everything I can to fix the performance issues (it's running under mod perl, the database gets cleaned up with "vacuum analyze", we cleaned out old dead tickets), and it's still dog slow even locally.
We like a lot of RT's features but as soon as we grew to more than a couple of support people, it fell down, hard.:(
FUD? Is that anything like the Apple switch commercials?
No, FUD is when they lie. The people in the switch commercials actually switched... I hated macs until MacOSX. MacOS9 is an ugly, unstable conglomeration of patches, but I was convinced by MacOSX to finally buy one, and I haven't gone back.
On the other hand, the article said stuff like:
The new version supports enhanced Quartz 2D font smoothing that greatly improves the look of Web pages. But rather than reciprocate, Apple has been cutting deals with one of Microsoft's chief rivals.
...which is pure FUD. What kind of reciprocation are you supposed to get for flipping a bit on a layer that's only provided for compatibility? The Quartz 2D font smoothing is for people that are too lazy to port their application to MacOSX native APIs. (Well, not that Quartz isn't native, but it's a continuation of the fugly MacOS < 10 APIs.)
Before Microsoft released this amazing new update to IE that turns on font smoothing, you could get it already by tweaking a system property. MS did *nothing* other than change a configuration file.
The article is full of things that MS is trying to take credit for. Yes, I'm sure porting Office to OSX found bugs and they reported them to Apple, but that doesn't make MS some kind of partner in OSX development like the article suggests.
Macs have shared libraries as well. The frameworks contain them, and abstract them for ease-of-upgrading (frameworks can contain multiple versions of libraries for backwards compatibility).
You can also build non-framework dynamic libraries and put them in/usr/local/lib or/usr/lib just like you can on any other unix.
Slashdot Mirror
5.6.0 has a number of nasty bugs that (at the very least) 5.6.1 fix, especially in unicode support. Also, Apple built their perl in a way that makes their perl modules go into an essentially unversioned directory, which makes it harder to upgrade perl as time goes on.
The longer they wait, the messier the upgrade is going to be...
Actually, even by your example, his argument stands.
When you get your license you are entering a contract with the state, saying "I am aware that if I exceed the posted speed limit I could get fined or even have my license taken away." When you speed, you're aware of the penalties and do it anyways. When you use multiple computers and your ToS says you can only use one, if you get caught, tough shit.
Paying for the service and then misusing it is only telling them that it *is* in their best interests to leave things as they are, and that they can continue to stick it to you all they want. On the other hand, if they start losing business, perhaps they'll cut their restrictions to draw customers. It works for SpeakEasy -- they have a ton of loyal customers because of their very easy-going ToS.
Yes, monopolies are bad, but breaking the contract you agreed to doesn't make them alright, it just makes you both bad.
Don't droppy that floppy!
I don't have an answer, but I do have a question. I never have understood "Ask Slashdot"s like this. My question is: why don't you join the mailing list?
It's usually readily apparent whether something's active by getting on theer list and seeing what kind, and how much traffic is going by. What does asking here gain you, other than a delay while you wait to find out?
I'll probably get marked as a troll by those linux zealot moderators among us, but oh well.
Not necessarily a troll, but I definitely disagree. And your attitude will likely get you troll status no matter how true or false your argument is. Anyways...
This "study" is preposterous. While Linux has a lower TCO in small lab or workgroup environments it is highly unsuited for real enterprise environments.
I think it would be the other way around. Small environments don't have the manpower for setup, but enterprise environments usually have to custom-build solutions no matter what they start with, be it Windows or Linux.
While Linux has many of the same feature analogs that Windows 2000 does, the Linux ones are usually incomplete or far inferior to their Microsoft counterparts and require a significant amount of time to install (In order to install software X I have to recompile these libraries too?!? But software Y relies on them, oh? I have to recompile that also?), maintain, and upgrade.
If this is your impression of linux, then you must be doing it wrong. You almost never need to hand-compile stuff nowadays. Most distributions not only have most of the stuff you need out of the box readily available, but have sane upgrade systems as well.
- A Distributed Directory Service. OpenLDAP with SSL? PLEASE! Active Directory works well, right out of the box.
And where exactly is your argument as to why LDAP doesn't work?
- Client Policy Management. Uh, I can install Samba and hack away to get ntconfig.pol to work, which is a seriously out of date policy scheme from the NT/9x days, or Active Directory.
I'm really not sure what you're saying here.
- Remote Software Installation? In Linux, whichever hack you choose, it's going to require a lot of administrator time. With Windows 2000, you've got the package installation via GPO's. Easy to setup, and you can automaticaly configure clients with software packages based on the organizational unit (eg. Lab 1 in building 4) they're in.
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade
- Centralized Management Tools. There are a few crappy third party tools for Linux, but they suck, to be frank. With Windows 2000, you have the MMC tool. Heavily upgraded since the NT4 days, this tool allows you to generate custom toolsets to administer your entire organization from one window, if you choose. Just add a snap-in and go.
There's a number of centralized management tools that get the job done, although I agree they're not as pretty as some of the Windows stuff. They're not unusable though.
- Remote Administration. Linux? X11 or VNC. Windows? The excellet Remote Desktop/Terminal Services software. Much more stable, smoother (movies & sound via RDP anyone?), and not clunky.
Maybe you can argue clunky, but unstable? X11 and VNC are perfectly stable.
- Kerberos, with no dicking around, nuff said.
Yeah, kerberos is still a bit of a pain, but much improved in recent distros.
- Enterprise monitoring utilities. With Linux, you have things like BB and syslog, yippee. With Windows 2000, you have BB, but also excellent tools like Microsoft Operations Manager, and the numerous other network monitoring tools (like the cool ones from Solar Winds).
OpenNMS. 'Nuff said.
- Automatic Updates & Patching. I think Red Hat still has that crappy update utility, sucks if you've gotta update 50 servers that way, though. Microsoft? Software Update Services and Automatic Updates right now. Not the perfect solution, but much better than what Linux has going for it.
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
With an even moderately competent Win2k administrator a network can be almost completely managed from his desktop.
Wasn't the whole point that a moderately competent Linux administrator managed more servers well than a moderately competent Win2k administrator? It's not like they made it up, they did a survey.
One can even argue that, with a competent administrator for each, Windows 2000 can be made more secure (while still being perfectly usable). I won't even get into the whole debate about the number of Linux exploits compared to the fewer Windows 2000 exploits on Bugtraq, because that really doesn't mean much overall.
Yeah, a good administrator can secure either OS reasonably well.
When it comes to pure software price, sure Linux is cheaper. When it comes to the enterprise? Please! Linux can't compete, right now. Microsoft software appears expensive (and most certainly is overpriced), but when you figure in man hours installing, updating, and maintaining, salaries for those people, and downtime while you recompile app x and lib y and app z that depends on y, Windows 2000 starts to look very attractive.
I think the whole point was that even counting all those things you're mentioning, Linux came out cheaper. You can always make an argument either way, but the point is, they went to real companies and asked them about their costs.
By encouraging GNU-Darwin, Apple helps GNU.
You make the assumption that Apple encourages GNU-Darwin.
Apple pretty much ignores GNU-Darwin; the only Darwin they care about is the one in Apple's CVS (and, by extension, OpenDarwin's CVS), not some guy's fork of it.
The thing that people seem to be missing in this discussion is that GNU-Darwin is *not* Apple's Darwin. They could care less about GNU-Darwin, and, in fact, pick BSD-licensed alternatives to GNU software if possible. Whether it's for idealism reasons or business ones, no one but the people making the decisions can say.
GNU-Darwin != Darwin.
GNU-Darwin is a pseudo-fork.
...is it just me, or is it a bit funny that a Sci-Fi author is convincing you to stop paying attention to Fantasy and instead think of Science? Can't help but think there's a bit of self-promotion there. =)
I'll second that... Standalone Complex is incredible. Closer to the manga, and just better done than the movie, I think. The movie was pretty light on character development, even though it was technically beautiful.
That would definitely be a problem, the 10.1 dev tools are not compatible with Jaguar at all. Install the July tools, and then the subsequent patches, and you should be fine.
Try a 'fink selfupdate-cvs' to get your base fink packages up to the latest. The likely problem is that your apt sources.list is pointing at the wrong place (we had to move the binary URL so it could coexist with 10.1 binaries on the apt repository).
A selfupdate-cvs should upgrade your apt and set up the proper locations, and from there you can do an "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" to get your installation updated.
this only works if you don't use 'fink' for installing source packages... fink (the program) doesn't (yet) understand held packages -- only dselect/dpkg/apt.
I think this is an incredible idea. Your post just sparked a discussion with my cube-neighbor about it, we had a couple of ideas.
Say an artist logs in and signs up to list new songs. He uploads some, and they immediately show in the "New Releases" area. The first (50? 100? Function of the number of visitors?) downloads will be free, to give a baseline for popularity. From there, popularity will determine the price. The quicker those 100 $0 MP3s get downloaded, the more valuable they'll be, so word-of-mouth on the discussion boards or whatever will help give them a jumping point.
Once the artist has made it into a pay setup, he can say how long he wants it to be free, what he wants as a minimum cap for the price, etc.
The price will be continually updated, determined by the popularity over a given time period, and then normalized by the artist's preferences on price and stuff. It ends up being kind of a stock market for music. =)
I really think this is an incredible idea. If I had the time I'd be in on trying to make such a thing, but alas, I already have too much crap going on as it is... :P
I load up the article, and what do I see?
Screenshot ...
ext2 and ext3 are identical on-disk, except ext3 has a journal file. Apple's HFS+ journaling is apparently similar, in that all you need to do is run a command to enable journaling on a disk, without reformatting.
They can't take my DeBrand chocolate away! This stuff is so good I ordered some and shipped it halfway across the country. Looks like it's time to make another order and help them out. No ulterior motive there... =)
First thing I do at any of these sites is click the "printable version" link. They usually skip all that "Next >" crap.
Unfortunately, the iMow isn't selling well ; They only sold about 500 units last year and Friendly Robotics's US local company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year. They've already dropped the price 50% since it's introduction[...]
Umm... didn't you pretty much answer your own question? They dropped the price in half and still no one's buying it, and they're on the skids to boot.
Seems like the answer is pretty obvious to me...
Of course, your examples are all games, which are a rather special case in the software industry. Most games only have a life of 6 months or so to make 95% of the money. And games' target audience are the people *least* likely to put Linux on the desktop -- well, second least. Most gamers like to tinker at least a little. The every-day mom or dad user is the least likely, since they have no reason to switch.
Anyways, what's much more likely is porting things that corporate users would use. If a web design company can pay $700 for Windows + DreamWeaver for their employees, or $300 for Linux + DreamWeaver, all else being equal, they'll pick the cheaper.
The author's point is that right now, all other things aren't equal. Most Linux ports of useful commercial software are incredibly half-assed.
I don't know if I agree with him that there are enough people that will buy the Linux versions that it will be worth the effort, but I do know that out of the many examples you could give, games are the least likely to succeed.
Linux is finally on equal (or better) terms in the server world, after many years of work. Only now is it starting to be looked at on the corporate desktop. There are still a number of steps that have to be made in the commercial world before things move seriously to the desktop in the kind of numbers that will have game sales support development on Linux in any reliable numbers.
Not currently, but it's recently been discussed. Please open a feature request before someone forgets about it, it would definitely be a handy thing to have...
As someone who works on a "distribution", I can say that it's not that simple. There's a *lot* of work that goes into fixing things that break on the move to new compilers, and into handling binary incompatibilities.
Apple has moved to GCC 3.1 with their new MacOSX release, and it's been a *real* pain handling the switch. The issue is not a matter of things that have been rebuilt to work with each other, the issue is maintaining backwards compatibility with old binaries. If joe sixpack built some package into /usr/local that uses C++, it will be broken when he upgrades... it's the same on every distro, unless you build things twice, or rebuild *everything*.
We use RT and once we got 10 thousand tickets or so it became unmanagable. The database abstraction module that RT uses coupled with the way that they query the database has made it all but unusable once you fill the database with more than a couple thousand tickets, at least on our machine, which is a PIII 800 with a gig of RAM...
I've done everything I can to fix the performance issues (it's running under mod perl, the database gets cleaned up with "vacuum analyze", we cleaned out old dead tickets), and it's still dog slow even locally.
We like a lot of RT's features but as soon as we grew to more than a couple of support people, it fell down, hard. :(
Yeah... If Linux on the desktop is dead, then I'm a necrophiliac!
FUD? Is that anything like the Apple switch commercials?
No, FUD is when they lie. The people in the switch commercials actually switched... I hated macs until MacOSX. MacOS9 is an ugly, unstable conglomeration of patches, but I was convinced by MacOSX to finally buy one, and I haven't gone back.
On the other hand, the article said stuff like:
Before Microsoft released this amazing new update to IE that turns on font smoothing, you could get it already by tweaking a system property. MS did *nothing* other than change a configuration file.
The article is full of things that MS is trying to take credit for. Yes, I'm sure porting Office to OSX found bugs and they reported them to Apple, but that doesn't make MS some kind of partner in OSX development like the article suggests.
Macs have shared libraries as well. The frameworks contain them, and abstract them for ease-of-upgrading (frameworks can contain multiple versions of libraries for backwards compatibility).
You can also build non-framework dynamic libraries and put them in /usr/local/lib or /usr/lib just like you can on any other unix.